The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Communication packets often include checksums used by receiving nodes in a network to verify integrity of the received communication packets. In some situations, an intermediate node that processes a communication packet modifies the communication packet, for example to add or to modify a timestamp. Although integrity of the communication packet remains otherwise sound, the newly added or modified timestamp will invalidate the checksum. In such situations, the checksum may be assigned a value of zero, which causes the receiving device to ignore the checksum value, in which case, the receiver is unable to verify the integrity of the received communication packet.